Language of Bromance

Podcast

Ian Wells Presents A Trip to the Toy Store

August 22, 2018

TOP 5 TOYS FROM MY YOUTH

This list is a list of toys that brought up the best memories of me playing as a child either with my own imagination or with friends. What became apparent immediately is how little super hero toys feature on the list.

Now of courseI had super hero toys but for whatever reason they didn’t meet the criteria to make the Top 5. Yes I had a Wolverine figure from the animated series. I had a few Batman items after the ’89 movie. Maybe it was a case of only having one X-man tested my imagination too much! I had Batman, Robin, Joker and a few vehicles but I wasn’t always in a Dark Knight mood as a child. The five I have chosen I think make the cut because of certain memories and because they allowed a certain amount of creative freedom. So enjoy and I hope it gets you reminiscing too.

Micro Machines

I have never really been a car guy but something always drew me to Micro Machines. Also I think it comes from the fact you could get cars and locations for the same price as one big toy. To this day I still like stuff on a small scale like Heroclix, I like the attention to detail. What will become obvious as you read this list is that I went through a stage where I could bend any toy I played with into being adapted to my love of spies. I remember having the ‘Highways & byways City Plaza’ set along with set #12 of All Terrain cars. Like my two favourite cars from that set would be my two lead spies. Because the plaza had a split level they would rendezvous there and park on different levels and switch cars. I also remember having a few police related vehicles and some army stuff. I had an army base that came with a stealth bomber so they just upped the spy stakes. Top secret flies and all that business. One summer that particularly sticks in my mind me and a friend played in my back garden with micro machines nearly everyday.

You see he had the ‘Super Van City’ so we would place that as the center piece then over the garden other sets we had between us would be positioned. Then we would divide stuff up that we would control as such. Like I had my army runway and he had an airport. If you had a flight going from one to the other you had to hand other then plan to the person’s set it was landing at. We both had similar plaza sets, his was painted different and called a hotel. So these would be set up as different cities. Looking back it does seem rather lame. But it was all well thought out stuff. We weren’t just playing toy cars to us it was like we were actually running these covert missions ourselves. Sometimes we would spend ages brainstorming ideas before we actually started playing, storylines would adapt as we were playing. When I think about it if our friendship had endured we could have been Hollywood’s next young writing duo.

Action Man

The clue is in the name as to why this is such a great toy. Being a man of action makes him versatile as well, he doesn’t have to be tied down to being a soldier. Guess what mine was? Thats right a spy! As a kid who grew up on 80’s/90’s action movies it was very easy to be influenced by them and go for Action Man after watching one. You watch Die Hard a bookcase becomes a skyscraper. Watch Predator your back yard becomes a mysterious island. Watch Cliffhanger and the staircase becomes a mountain. My Action man didn’t start as a spy, he started as a ninja. A bright red pyjama wearing ninja! So I had to get him kitted out to get the spy look. Among my favourite sets were a leather jacket that came with a sniper rifle which would break down into sections. An electronic suitcase equipped with laptop, cell phone and headset. Sadly ninja Action Man met a grizzly end when the gift of my imagination became too much for his plastic limbs. See I decided spy stuff was too mundane and created a scenario where gravity was on the fritz.

Basically this was just me bored in the back yard throwing him continuously into the air, getting higher and higher. Well I chanced myself in catching him one too many times and snap! Leg separated from body. I remember that ninja Action Man was rather a pricey item at the time so of course I was devastated and of course I had to replace him on a budget. Enter one of the lamest Action Men ever Operation T.I.G.E.R. A basic figure who came with a hand gun, a black vest, tiger stripe trousers oh and a cheesy tiger tattoo on his chest! One of my fondest memories of Action Man was the little catalogues you would get with each set. I would spend hours pouring over them dreaming up missions. Of course I could never afford them all but it sparked the imagination. Around the time I had my Action Man there was a cheaper version so if there was something you really wanted you could always lower the price tag and settle for second best. When I got bored of playing with toys I myself would become the man of action. Taking different parts from different toys I had over the years to form my own sets for my missions.

Lego

Lego is brilliant because it is only restricted by your imagination. Its longevity is testament to its greatness. You may think a toy coming with instructions is restrictive, you would be wrong. The pirate Lego was my first true love. It all stemmed from a little set I used to call ‘Monkey Island’. It was a pirate, a monkey on a base with a buried treasure chest. From there I was hooked. I must have spent years on the pirate stuff before my tastes eventually branched out. Police sets were always appealing. Of course with my spy fetish my police were more like secret army intelligence level. Especially once they were equipped with the brilliant ‘Surveillance Squad’ (6348) set. I had a set called ‘Coyote Canyon’ (6552) which was a weekend mountain retreat. Not! It was a top secret spy hideout! Even my ‘Patriot Jet’ (6331) despite being bright blue was a covert spy plane!

Of course the biggest part of the fun with Lego was the building. You could be hours building before you got to playing, but it didn’t matter. My bad habit when building was to take a random brick and chew on it while looking for the pieces I wanted. I never liked those alternate builds that were on the back of the box. Mainly because they seemed so uninspiring, but also because they didn’t come with any instructions. When I out grew toys as an outsider looking in at one stage it looked like Lego had died a death. Of course they then got into creating sets from licensed properties which appeals to the nerd in me. These licensed sets though seem so expensive. In my day Lego was never cheap cheap, there were sets to cater for every price bracket and the licensed stuff seems to dominate now. If I ever have kids I would prefer them to be making stuff from their own imagination rather than something they just see on TV! I have to admit to being a bit of a sucker for the number of fake or ‘FLego’ minifigs available online. Yeah it may not be good for the industry but it is cheaper buying one unofficial minifig than a whole S.H.I.E.L.D Hellicarriers worth of set. I’m 30 the minifigs are for display I’m not looking to build sets and recreate the movies!

M.A.S.K

This toy line can count itself very unlucky not to bag the number one spot. A lot of my fondness for it stems from the lucky way I acquired a lot of the toys. I had Rhino and Stiletto as presents or brought from saved money. Back in those days kids could playing safely in the streets and some older boys must have seen me playing with my truck. A few days latter they knocked at my door with a whole bin bag full of M.A.S.K stuff. It was like Christmas in summer. This bag had everything in it! Countless variations of figures and masks, Jackhammer, Switchblade, Bullet and the prize piece Outlaw. Outlaw was such a great toy its a shame it belonged to the villains. The appeal of the toy line was in the size. The figures overall were detailed in the costumes. Though the faces were rather blank. The vehicles were particularly detailed in the interiors. Rhino had actual Goodyear tyres! You get fit the figures inside the cumbersome vehicles and have room to play with them. Vehicles for six inch toy lines started getting to be the size of small dogs. I used to love actually playing with these toys outside. The smallest incline was like a mountain. An area of bush became a whole forest and again it was all down to their perfect size. Lastly I have such an affection for the M.A.S.K toy line because none of my other friends had it and even now they have no recollection of it as a cartoon. It felt like I had my own little universe.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

Of course the heroes in a half shell take top spot. I am so fond of these toys, the cartoon and the movies. I still read the IDW comic and can only imagine how that would have fuelled my imagination further when I played with the toys. As a kid I went through a phase like every kid in the 90’s where everything I had was TMNT related. Lunch box, pencil case, pyjamas and board games. Writing about this is going to make me seem like a spoilt child. I really wasn’t it took me multiple Christmas and birthdays to accumulate all the stuff. Yes I had all four turtles, Splinter and Shredder. I even had Usagi without any idea of who he really was. The Christmas after the first movie came out I hit the jackpot getting the Party Wagon and the Blimp. The Turtle figures and vehicles were very sturdy I don’t think I ever broke any of them. I lost all the weapons eventually though. But yeah they were robust and could take some tough action. They didn’t have much articulation but enough to recreate some karate moves. They were also very durable in water and they wiped down easy. So again I never had qualms about playing with them outdoors. God nreds must be screaming at me now! I used to have the blimp hanging from my ceiling.

I would recreate scenes from the cartoons repeatedly and then when the movie hit it was like a whole new world of ideas had opened up. It was now like having two continuities though I didn’t know about things like that back then. I remember a few years later when the height of the TMNT buzz had died off a bit. I think the third movie had been out I got into the Mini Mutants range. I absolutely loved this line. It really got me into the turtles again and my imagination ran wild. I first had the Pizzeria set. But what I remember most about getting the actual mini turtles was seeing what other toys I could fit them into! I then got the Subway hideout set. This was mind blowing at a young age. Because the sets were so small you could have more! You would see the Turtles in the second movie move into a new hideout in an abandoned subway car and now you could buy a play set of nearly the exact same thing! The pizzeria set had a manhole escape in one corner and the subway car had a slide entrance. I set them up on shelfs so the two sets were essentially connected. God I’m such a nerd! The TMNT toys were always very visually appealing and some of the more modern stuff still each, but so expensive. They will always have a space in my fond memories and every now and then I still make some purchases. I have a Raphael of many different shapes and sizes collection.

About Language of Bromance
Together Richard and Shawn formed the podcast The Language of Bromance and from there it has been nothing but fun. The duo laugh about things they go through, stories in the news and even getting serious discussing net neutrality along with other issues. Every so often their friendship turns to a bitter rivalry with their nerdiest creation the draft episodes. An original take on a best of or a top 10 list. The draft episodes are done like an NFL Draft 7 rounds where Richard and Shawn flip-flop picks on various topics.